For me the most fascinating question that 2010 posed has to do with something that most likely happened between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. The question was—did some of our ancestors get it on with Neanderthals? And the answer was—they very likely did.

In May of the year that is ending today an exhaustive study by evolutionary anthropologist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his team suggested that Neanderthals and humans did mess around. Of course, being a serious scientist given to weighing his every word, as opposed to a superficial journalist like me for whom words are a dime a dozen, Dr. Paabo put his findings thus: "Neandertals probably mixed with early modern humans before Homo sapiens split into different groups in Europe and Asia."

One particularly delicate term to describe sex across the species line which caught my attention was interfertile. As in Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were interfertile. It is amazing that when I write about this very significant anthropological/genetic finding, I make it sound so very smutty. I can almost picture a stocky, hairy and unclothed Neanderthal male, with his eyes darkened by his bushy eyebrows, lurking behind a tree, ogling a human female.

The pick up line may have gone something like this: “Your bush or mine?”

Dr. Paabo’s finding also suggested that Eurasians could be between 1% and 4% Neanderthal as a result of the scene my interfertile imagination just conjured up. I have always felt odd within fully human groups. It is possible that I am one of those who may carry more than 4% Neanderthal in me. It is more like 50%. The other half is extraterrestrial. If you cannot imaging humans and Neanderthals getting it on, wait till you visualize aliens and Neanderthals mixing it up.

December 30, 2010

In the concluding part of my interview author Philip Goldberg talks about whether he apprehends any pushback against the rising influence of yoga.

Q: In your long experience studying this subject, are people surprised when you point out the widespread influence of Indian philosophy? What are their typical reactions?

PG: The most common response I’ve had is similar to my own once I dug into my formal research for the book: “I knew Indian spiritual teachings had influenced America, but I didn’t realize it was quite that widespread or that profound.” They’re surprised by the subtlety of it, and by the non-obvious streams and tributaries through which the teachings spread.

Q: Do you apprehend any organized backlash or, at the very least, pushback against once it is popularly recognized that Indian philosophy is more deeply entrenched here than they have understood?

PG: Not a big one, but some of it is inevitable. There has always been a backlash from both mainstream religion – conservative Christians in particular – and the anti-religious left. Vivekananda faced up to it in 1893, and all the important gurus were confronted by it. Right now, there’s an anti-yoga campaign by some Christian preachers. I’d be very pleased if my book becomes a lightning rod for such a controversy. Bring ‘em on!

Q: How do you look at trends such as people saying that yoga is a Hindu tool and ought to be countered with a Christian yoga?

PG: That’s a more complicated issue than is often realized. The question, “Is yoga a form of Hinduism” depends entirely on how one defines both yoga and Hinduism. That there are people teaching Christian Yoga and Jewish Yoga strikes me as a backhanded compliment to one of the great glories of the Vedic tradition: it’s universality and adaptability. That having been said, the idea that yoga is “a Hindu tool,” i.e., a form of stealth conversion, strikes me as a projection by Christians of their own messianic drive to convert the “heathen.” That conversion is not in the Hindu repertoire – and that the gurus and swamis and yoga masters are content to have their students become better Christians – is hard for many to comprehend.

Q: Do you think that it is the intellectual underpinnings of Vedanta or the mind/body wellness aspects of yoga which have made people more comfortable accepting them?

PG: It’s been the combination of the two, and it’s hard to separate them. Certainly, in recent years, the popularity of yoga as a wellness system has been dominant, but that has also exposed millions of people to at least the basic premises of Vedanta.

December 29, 2010

There has always been a pervasive but undocumented feeling that Indian philosophy, as manifest in Vedanta on the intellectual plain and yoga on the physical plain, has very significantly influenced the West in general and America in particular. That feeling now finds a meticulously constructed scholastic endorsement in the form of an important new book.

Author Philip Goldberg’s ‘American Veda—From Emerson to the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West’ (Harmony Books, 398 pages, $26) offers a comprehensive account of the inroads made by Indian philosophy since the early 19th century. In an interview Goldberg dwells on how and why Indian philosophy has had such a profound impact in the West. Here is part one of the interview.

Q: To what do you attribute the fact that Indian philosophy has had as deep an impact on the West as your book seeks to establish?

Philip Goldberg: The combination of Vedanta and Yoga was a perfect match for certain American values: freedom of choice and religion, individuality, scientific rationality, and pragmatism. They appealed especially to well-educated Americans who were discontent with ordinary religion and unsatisfied by secularism, giving them a way to be authentically spiritual without compromising their sense of reason, their consciences or their personal inclinations.

Q: Is it as much a tribute to the openness of the West as it is to the appeal of Indian philosophy?

PG: Yes, indeed. I think the great teachers who came here from India were very much aware of that, and they adapted the teachings accordingly.

Q: Do you think the mainstreaming of Indian philosophy, as manifest in the widespread practice of yoga, has to do a great deal with the fact that a lot of it comes across as secular and even agnostic?

PG: Yes, I think the remarkable growth of the “spiritual but not religious” cohort of Americans would have been unthinkable without access to the practices derived from Hinduism and Buddhism. In addition, the philosophy was presented so rationally that its premises could be regarded as hypotheses, and the practices were so uniform and so widely applicable that they lent themselves to scientific experimentation.

Q: Is there a sense among Americans drawn to Indian philosophy that it is dogma free and therefore non-threatening?

PG: Yes, and premises that might be taken as dogma were usually presented by teachers as ideas to be verified by one’s own experience, not as take-it-or-leave-it or believe-it-or-else doctrine.

Q: The Bhagvad Gita, for instance, is essentially a distilled, unemotional, remarkably modern code of conduct that is shorn of any denominational doctrines. Do you think that helps the cause of Indian philosophy?

PG: You bet. And not just a code of conduct, but also a manual for self-realization. People of all faiths and no faith have cherished it for that reason.

Q: Does the fact that Hinduism is not institutionalized, codified, congregational or instructional help in its spread?

PG: Certainly that’s true of the Hindu-based teachings that caught on with Americans, which were not even called Hinduism as such. The fact that Hinduism, even in India, is decentralized, diverse, non-institutional, etc., made it convincing that anyone can adopt the teachings without converting to a foreign religion.

Q: One detects two distinct trends in your book in support of your primary contention about how Indian spirituality changed the West. One trend is at the operational level where words such as mantra, guru, karma and pundits have so seamlessly become part of the mainstream lexicon. The other trend is much deeper in terms of internalizing the core values of Indian philosophy. Do you think people in America are conscious of this?

PG: Some are conscious of it, and therefore grateful to the Indian legacy. Others are not: it’s seeped into the American consciousness in subtle but profound ways.

Q: You speak about Americans accepting everything, from falafel to philosophy, depending on the circumstances. What do you think made the circumstances right for them to accept some of the core philosophical concepts from India?

PG: The rise of secularism, the success of science and especially the widespread alienation from both materialistic values and mainstream religion, which was not providing reliable methods of personal transformation and transcendence.

Q: When you talk of “Vedization of America”, do you mean that it has been a conscious development? Could it, for instance, also not have been a consequence of secularization/pluralization that the rise of agnostic information technologies?

PG: If you mean, could the trends I describe be attributed to the growth of pluralism and other social forces, independent of the Indian influence, it is very hard to say. Certainly, the combination of factors made for a perfect storm. I tend to think that the experiential practices of meditation and yoga, and the intellectual framework of Vedanta, accelerated, deepened and broadened what might have been an inevitable but amorphous evolution.

December 28, 2010

For me 2010 is an arbitrary number for a planet that is about 4.5 billion years old in a universe that is about 14 billion years old. So is 2011 and every other number that precedes and succeeds it. A section of the human race just pulled it out of its collective arse and said, “Here, follow this.” And we all do. That’s as far as it goes. It means nothing and has no special sanctity attached to it. Also, it has no significance other than what we choose to give it. As long as you remember this I am fine with using any arbitrary number. You can call 2011 7850 if you please and I will accept it.

With that bile out of my way, here is what I actually wanted to write about. Occasionally, I do look at the kinds of searches that bring people from around the world to this blog. Yesterday I spent about half an hour looking at the various statistics about this blog and established something I had sensed all along. In 2010 the search that brought the highest number of visitors from across the world to my blog is (pretend you hear the drumroll)… Savita Bhabhi and her bra/boobs. (The number is high within the low number that visits the blog.)

Savita Bhabhi, as some of you of the scholastic bent of mind would know, is supposed to be the most popular fictional porn “toon” character of Indian origin on the Internet. I have written only one post about Savita Bhabhi in the context of how the Indian state of Goa was unhappy at the fact that the creators of the porn fiction comic had based one of their issues in Goa. ‘Savita Bhabhi is tormenting Goa’s moral police’ was the headline of the post on September 21, 2010. The post was in response to an IANS story that quoted Goa’s tourism chief Nikhil Desai saying that those who visit such sites are “perverts.”

"People who visit these sites are perverts. There will be perverts in this world. I think people who really want to go on a clean holiday will not go by the impression of Goa created on these websites," Desai has been quoted as saying by Mayabhushan Nagvenkar of the IANS. I particularly like the emphasis ‘There will be perverts in the world.’ Indeed, there will be Mr. Desai, there will be.

Of all the search combinations that I read in my data the funniest was “bhabhi in bra.” I think it came from someone in Delhi, which somehow seems appropriate. So there is actually someone in Delhi who sits in front of his/her computer, cracks the knuckles and punches in “bhabhi in bra” in Google search. Those of us who know the cultural significance of bhabhi (specifically meaning a brother’s wife and broadly, any good friend’s wife) know that while at the loftier level she is seen as a mother figure, at the baser level she is also seen as a person who can, if she chooses to, introduce one to forbidden pleasures. More about that some other time.

What this data has showed me is that no matter what I write, from our anthropocentric delusions of grandeur to full behavioral modernity and from Schrodinger’s cat to President Obama’s India visit, ultimately what most concentrates my readers’ minds is the profound question – Is Savita Bhabhi is wearing a bra? Brilliant.

December 27, 2010

We are regarded as “anatomically modern humans” with “full behavioral modernity.” Anthropologists say anatomically modern humans can be traced back about 195,000 years to Africa. Before that we were in the realm of archaic Homo sapiens. By 50,000 BP (before present) we reached full behavioral modernity, including language, music and other forms of culture.

Where am I going with this sketchy primer on human evolution? It is the claim of “full behavioral modernity” that I find difficult to square with the very widespread tradition of gender control/oppression aimed at women. The New York Times has a story today by Adam B. Ellick about how young Pakistani women go through a terrible time striking a balance between economic necessity that compels them to work outside their homes and tradition that seeks to keep them confined.

There is something bizarrely out of sync in a society where a woman is encouraged to strap explosives around her body and blow herself up very publicly as one just did on December 25 in the Bajaur region killing over 40 people, but slapped across her face and threatened with limb destruction if she wants to work and earn a decent, honorable living. In their defense, those men who trained the female bomber did not violate their tradition that forbids women from working with “strange” men. She did not work with “strange” men. She merely blew them up along with other women and children.

I do not wish to single out Pakistan when it comes to questioning the claim of “full behavioral modernity” but one has to concede that it has become a powerful example of what can go wrong with a society that lets tradition run amuck.

The Times story cites a young woman named Rabia Sultana of Karachi. Sultana, 21, works as a cashier at McDonald’s. Her tradition-bound brother strongly disapproves. So, according to the story, he slapped her across her face and threatened to break her legs if she ever stepped out of her home. The story says this:

“At work, some women spend more time deflecting abuse from customers than serving them. On the way home, they are heckled in buses and condemned by neighbors. It is so common for brothers to confiscate their uniforms that McDonald’s provides women with three sets.

“If I leave this job, everything would be O.K. at home,” Ms. Sultana said. “But then there’d be a huge impact on our house. I want to make something of myself, and for my sisters, who are at home and don’t know anything about the outside world.”

That brings me back to full behavioral modernity. I understand that this is a scientific term and not necessarily a construct with moral connotations. Nevertheless, it is a bit of a stretch to say that as a species we reached full behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago and yet confront today a world where people get kicked for something as trivially modern as wanting to work.

As John Lennon put it in an unrelated context, “Strange days indeed, most peculiar mama.”

December 26, 2010

I have just begun discovering T E Lawrence far beyond his ephemeral yet captivating portrayal by David Lean in ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ I am simultaneously reading Michael Korda’s ‘Hero: The life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia’ and Lawrence’s own masterpiece ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom.’

I watch the movie every few weeks for many reasons, including its cinematic beauty, but equally for its many telling scenes. One of my all time favorite comes early on when Lawrence, played at once with arresting and liberating brilliance by Peter O’Toole, extinguishes a match with his thumb and index finger.

When one of his fellow Englishmen tries to emulate him, he ends up hurting himself.

“Oh, it damn well hurts,” says the fellow Englishman.

“Certainly it hurts,” says Lawrence.

The fellow English character called William Potter, asks, “Well, what’s the trick then?”

O’Toole turns around and tells him, “The trick William Potter is not minding that it hurts.”

The great line is as profound as it is foreshadowing of Lawrence’s reported addiction to masochism.

A lot has been said and written about the enormous role Lawrence played in shaping the destiny of the Arabs, though he himself tends to be rather modest. “My proper share was a minor one, but because of a fluent pen, a free speech and a certain adroitness of brain, I took upon myself, as I describe it, a mock primacy. In reality I never had any office among the Arabs: was never in charge of the British mission with them,” Lawrence writes.

Although the line about the trick being not minding that it hurts was probably the work of the movie’s writers Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, reading Lawrence tells me that he was equally capable of having said that. Sample this bit from the book. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. This I did.”

Switching between Lawrence’s effortless cadence and Korda’s insistent detailing of his protagonist’s life is quite an experience. It is one of those rare juxtapositions, split screens if you will, between what the man thought of himself and how history views him. I recommend it.

December 25, 2010

In this concluding part of his interview journalist turned writer Jai Arjun Singh talks about a range of things, including why ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’ director has not lived up to the promise of his first film.

Q: A lot of the issues and the cynicism that surrounded them have multiplied a million fold since then. Do you think a reenergized/reworked JBDY can work better today in terms of its commercial success considering the apparently higher responsiveness to this kind of humor now?

A: Very difficult to answer. There may be higher responsiveness to this kind of humor today (I'm not sure if there is actually, but since you postulate it...), but in my view today's India also nurtures its sacred cows more carefully than it did 28 years ago. Anything to do with religion, however tangential, becomes inflammatory - and JBDY did have a corrupt Christian municipal commissioner whose corpse ends up "playing" the role of a heroine from a revered Hindu epic in a stage farce that cast the righteous Pandavas as the disrobers and the evil Kauravas as the guys who want to cover up the woman. Lots of potential material for "offence-taking" and "sentiment-hurting" there.

Incidentally, Kundan spent a long time working on the script for his sequel . He's given up on it now after Ravi Baswani's death, I think, but I doubt it would have worked anyway - especially being produced by a big-money producer, which is something that goes against the very essence of a Jaane bhi Do Yaaro.

Q: Its irreverent humor is reminiscent of some of the sketches on America’s signature satirical TV show Saturday Night Live. Why do you think that kind of humor has not taken hold within the popular entertainment landscape? I cannot think of any other Hindi movie since or before. Can you? A: Can't tell you how long I've spent wrestling with this question, and I don't have a satisfactory answer to it. The only thing I can think of is that this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime, serendipitous moments when a group of struggling artistes, hungry to express their creativity and generally on a similar wavelength, happened to come together to work with a script written by two men who had a genuine knack for exaggeration and zaniness.

It's become something of a cliché to say that Indians lack a sense of humor (at least when it comes to laughing at themselves, which is the building block for all humor), but there's a lot of truth in this. There must be comedians who feel intimidated about expressing themselves (through stand-up acts or whatever) because of the history of protests and censorship. I've been to one or two stand-up comedy acts by Indian comedians, and while some of it was funny in its way, I couldn't help wonder at the lack of genuinely edgy, dangerous humor. Other such Hindi movies - I thought Pankaj Advani's Sankat City came somewhat close, but can't really think of much else.

Q: How receptive were all the dramatis personae of the film in candidly sharing the tribulations of making a movie on a budget that today would not buy a shirt for Shah Rukh Khan?

A: Generally speaking, very receptive. Kundan was very cautious at first - when I spoke to him on the phone from Delhi, he was a bit short, reluctant and eventually said he needed to meet me in Mumbai for a bit before he would agree that I was the right person to do such a book. But once the ice was broken, he was very helpful and friendly. I can understand his reservations - this film has become a real albatross around his neck, it's become a pretext for people to wonder why he never did anything comparable again, and he's also a bit fed up with the deification of the movie by its fans.

The others were very helpful too, particularly Pawan Malhotra (who worked as production assistant on the film at age 22), Ranjit Kapoor, the late Ravi Baswani, Sudhir Mishra, cinematographer Binod Pradhan, and the art designer Robin Das. Most of them are a little bemused that this little film they made 28 years ago has become such a phenomenon, but they all enjoy talking about the making of it. Unfortunately, try as I might, I just couldn't get in touch with a couple of people - Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Pankaj Kapoor, for example.

Q: In retrospect do you think that the bootstrapping that went into its making gave JBDY that raw, experimental edge that a more settled crew may not have been able to pull off?

A: I think so, yes. Orson Welles said once that "the absence of limitations is the enemy of Art", and I think that applies here. Like I said earlier, the low budget had its disadvantages in the sense that the film looks raw and choppy in places. But the advantage was that you had all these people working in a very intense situation, doing things purely for the sake of their creativity and for the love of what they were doing - no ego hassles, no complaints about money, lots of collaboration, people like Renu Saluja and Sudhir Mishra multi-tasking and consequently becoming more and more involved with the project. A big-budget production by its very nature wouldn't permit that level of camaraderie and personal involvement.

Q: Have you been able to get a sense why Kundan Shah never quite lived up to JBDY? What is his take?

A: There are many theories - my own feeling is that he essentially isn't the sort of person who fits into a commercial film industry. In 1982, he got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a low-profile movie in the company of friends who were at his beck and call day and night, and without much interference from producers who wanted something changed here or there. It was a very, very rare experience, and he was never going to get that level of freedom again. (As Ratna Pathak Shah put it in a TV interview, the universe seems to conspire to make things happen for a first-time director. But after that, you're on your own.) I also get the impression that he's a very idealistic man - and idealism can of course make you inflexible when it comes to creating something in collaboration with many other people, with external constraints.

That said, I think Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na was a solid film, in some ways more well-rounded even than JBDY; it's a pity that many people didn't view it on its own terms, choosing instead to compare it to JBDY.

Q: Do you see possibilities monographs like this one becoming a trend since India has quite a tradition of compelling individual pieces of cinema, art and literature?

Hopefully - but more importantly I hope they are done by the right people. I'd really like to see a tradition of rigorous, intelligent (but also accessible) long-form film writing in India.

Financial rewards for writing a book like yours, or for that matter almost any other, in India are generally so small they do not encourage this kind of informed, serious writing. What do you think is the best way to make it both commercially and qualitatively viable?

At risk of sounding foolishly idealistic myself, big publishing houses have to look at quality over quantity; that simply isn't happening now. Editors everywhere have ridiculously high monthly quotas to meet, which means they commission projects and then leave the writers to their own devices. And when it comes to writing narrative non-fiction - which involves research and time - the financial incentives for the author have to be better.I wonder what the solution is.

December 24, 2010

In 1983, a first time director made a film that introduced Indian audiences to the genre of absurdist, black comedy. Twenty seven years later a young journalist turned writer has set out to tell what made ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’ (JBDY) a cult classic which is more relevant now than ever before.

Kundan Shah’s film, which was at once a harrowing spoof on and serious indictment of corruption in public life and the media’s role as an enabler, has found a passionate chronicler in Delhi-based journalist and reviewer Jai Arjun Singh.

His monograph ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro—Seriously funny since 1983’ (HarperCollins India, Rs. 250) has been described by the 33-year-old Singh as “the story of the making of the film, starting with the unusual career trajectory of Kundan Shah and the writing of the original English script, on to the assembling of the crew, the shooting, post-production, etc., with a bit of analysis thrown in here and there.”

Considering that Singh was barely six years old when the movie was released he came to it first as a child and again nearly two decades later as a professional reviewer. The movie has grown for him from just being chuckle-worthy to a subject worthy of serious analysis. “There was actually quite a big gap between the "before" and the "after" - I watched it numerous times on TV as a child in the 80s, and then saw it for the first time as an adult 18-20 years later, in 2008,” Singh told me in an interview. Here is part 1 of that interview:

Q: Describe the process of developing a structure for a book about a movie that seemed to break all the established Indian cinematic structures of its time.

A: I know what you mean - it was a bit daunting at first, because I was thinking "Readers will expect a book about JBDY to be as wacky in tone and structure as the film itself was", but eventually I had to set those thoughts aside and work with my own strengths as a journalist/reviewer. I decided to write this as a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end (too many film books in India don't attempt a coherent narrative). It would be the story of the making of the film, starting with the unusual career trajectory of Kundan Shah and the writing of the original English script, on to the assembling of the crew, the shooting, post-production, etc., with a bit of analysis thrown in here and there.

Q:Would you share the difference between the way you responded to the movie when you saw it before and after you became a journalist and a professional critic?

A: There was actually quite a big gap between the "before" and the "after" - I watched it numerous times on TV as a child in the 80s, and then saw it for the first time as an adult 18-20 years later, in 2008! Some of the differences are obvious: as an adult, I was much more aware of the deeper undertones of scenes like "thoda khao, thoda phenko" (obscene wastage in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is so wide) or the pointedness of the line "Aage jaake log iss flyover ke neeche apne ghar basaaenge".

In fact, I saw it as a very polemical, political film disguised as a comedy. As a child, one simply laughed a lot, though I should also say that my most vivid memory was of the startling final scene - the throat-cutting gesture, the association of a beloved inspirational song like "Hum Honge Kaamyaab" with such a bleak ending.

But also, from the critical perspective, watching it in 2008 I was more aware of the film's flaws: the little moments that were jarring and shoddy, the disjointedness of some shots, the sense that this film was put together on a very small budget by strugglers who weren't even sure it would come together. It’s a movie I admire much more for concept than for execution, though, of course, some elements in the execution are very good.

Q: It is more than a quarter century since the movie was made. Has the passage of time given the movie any extra artistic weight?

A: Well, it certainly seems more relevant than ever before. In post-liberalisation India, one takes corruption and inequality so much more for granted that if exactly the same film were made today, Vinod and Sudhir would seem hopelessly naive - even stupid - standing about singing "Hum Honge Kaamyaab". But there are so many times when one reads the daily newspapers and thinks instantly of Jaane bhi do Yaaro: news about that bridge collapse just before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, for example, and the attendant fiascos that made it obvious that the bulk of the money was being siphoned away. Or even the controversies that media finds itself in - the collusion between journos and fixers. A lot of the more loony things in the JBDY script don't even seem exaggerated now! In any case, real life always manages to get a few steps ahead of satire.

But that's about the content. In terms of its form/execution, the film hasn't gained artistic weight with the passage of time - a young viewer watching it today is likely to find it very raw and shoddy, perhaps even a curio. That's inevitable, of course - it was a very resource-strapped production. But I hope that contemporary directors/scriptwriters with a Kundan Shah-like sensibility manage to make more such films that have similar content but are technically better made.

Q: Would it be correct to presume that you saw the film after it had already become a cult classic? If so, did that fact in any way shape your view of it?

A: My 2008 viewing of it was after it became a cult classic, yes. When I saw it as a child it was probably still in the process of becoming a cult - in fact, households like mine, watching it on Doordarshan and guffawing in their living rooms, were part of that nascent cult.

I don't think my viewing of it as an adult was particularly shaped by its reputation - I came to it with fresh eyes since I didn't remember most of it too well, just a few scattered scenes.

Q: Since I have not yet read the book, give me some idea about how you approached the subject matter. Is it a behind-the-scenes look describing what made it a cult classic?

A: This is partly answered in the first answer, but to add to that: the book is a mix of reportage and analysis. The formal structure chronicles the making of the film (with an early section that's a part-biography/profile of Kundan Shah, who in my mind was the book's protagonist), but there are also lots of asides: for instance, in one passage Ranjit Kapoor, the film's dialogue-writer, mentions R K Laxman. So immediately after that reference I put in a little insert (almost like a box in a feature story) containing Kundan's thoughts on Laxman, whom he admired greatly. It's in a different font since it briefly interrupts the main narrative. So there's a bit of experimenting of that sort. And at the end, yes, there is some analysis/speculation about its cult appeal - how it came along at the right time to strike a chord with an audience that was largely polarised between anything-goes commercial cinema and self-consciously arty cinema.

Q: JBDY was primarily a stinging indictment of corruption rendered in the form of an absurdist black comedy. Do you think it would have worked in any other way?

A: Oh, there are many different ways to tackle the same subject, but I think black comedy/absurdist comedy when done well is a particularly effective tool for social commentary. And men like Kundan and Ranjit Kapoor had the right sort of sensibility that enabled them to sustain something like this.

But yes, one reason that Jaane bhi do Yaaro got away with so much (its skewering of corruption and authority figures, its irreverence towards death) is that it wore the garb of an absurdist comedy. If it had treated the same subjects with a straight face or with a pedantic tone, it might never have got produced, or might have faced censorship problems. It's unfortunate that many people don't take comedy as a medium too seriously, but the upside is that you can get away with a lot! (Part 2 tomorrow)

December 23, 2010

Today, two random posts about two totally unrelated subjects and both, I suspect, totally unnecessary.

I have always been a sucker for smart, high tech visual experiences, especially those that sell a lifestyle I cannot afford. I have just chanced upon this one about a new campaign called ‘The Center of Now Downtown Dubai’. The campaign is obviously aimed at marketing Dubai, again, as, for want of a better line, the center of now. I think it has my vote. It does make me want to catch the next flight to what looks like the downtown of the world.

However, it not so much what the campaign invites you to as the way it does. As innovatively interactive uses of the Web goes, I think this campaign works its charms well. The campaign has been designed for Emaar Properties, described as one of the world’s leading property developers which is responsible for a lot of what Dubai looks like today.

There is a time slider in the center of the main page of the site that revolves around Dubai’s signature monument, the Burj Khalifa. As you turn the dial the video window on the left changes its content to tell you what the possibilities are at that particular time. Quite fortuitously, I slid the time slider to a time when a pretty model goes to the spa at The Palace Hotel where the following happens.

And when this, top, happens, this, below, follows soon after.

In short it is a deeply relaxing and calming experience (not the exact feeling I had in mind while watching it but this is a family blog) that adds to the overall downtown Dubai experience.

The website is flash-heavy and if you are still in the dinosaur age of the Net using slow speed connectivity, then I suggest you avoid it altogether. Come to think of it, if you are still using slow speed Internet, you are probably not the right demographic for this campaign.

****

Unexpressed thoughts are like undigested food for me. Both cause a great deal of bile. For the latter I take various forms of ranitidine tablets and for the former I write this blog.

I woke up at 3 in the morning today with President Ronald Reagan’s favorite catchphrase ‘Trust but verify.’ It had stayed with me from last evening’s news conference by President Barack Obama who used it in the context of the Senate’s approval of a new arms control treaty with Russia.

‘Trust but verify’ has become the guiding principle of US foreign policy ever since Reagan used it while dealing with the Soviet Union. It is an inherently contradictory phrase because trust and verify are mutually exclusive. One precludes the other. And yet politicians in the US, including presidents, use it as if it was divinely revealed. They do not use it conscious of its inherent contradiction. They use it as if it is possible to do both.

I think it is time to retire it because it makes no sense, even though it sounds as if it does.

December 22, 2010

In banning the export of onions the Indian government has yet again come face to face with the politically destabilizing power of the bulb. With the rising prices of onions stinking up the political debate the government does not have much choice but to rein them in. After all the country has a long history of the price of onions setting off collective political rebellion.

If salt is the sauce of the poor, as Cervantes said, then onions are equally the only affordable base flavor for them. It is not without reason that the expression “Aloo, pyaaz ke daam pata chal jayenge (You will discover the prices of potatoes and onions)” is used as an effective reality check. The price of onions has been touching eighty rupees (about $1.75) a kilo which may not sound like a lot in dollars but it is, in fact, greatly disruptive for a vast number of Indians. It is still not uncommon to see a considerable number of poor Indians making do with one roti and half an onion as their staple.

Onions have long been a powerful culinary element as much as they have been a potent political symbol in India. It is never good politics to mess around with them. In politics they do indeed bring tears without even cutting them. No wonder the prime minister’s office feels compelled to monitor onions.

Along with banning their exports the government has also allowed their imports at no duty at all. Not a bad going for something that grows underground with only a tiny shoot above it.